A brain dump about living and working on the edge of the social web.

14 posts from January 2006

January 28, 2006

Ouch! My work laptop hard drive crashed this morning. The endless loop of start up. No safe mode, no command line, dust. Nothing could be salvaged. So now I have a brand new hard drive. And a clean slate. All my apps were reinstalled, and there is a backup... but it's really tempting to just start over. Totally fresh. My drive was filled up with nearly 5 years of Yahoo! Shopping work. Wireframes (some of the first at Yahoo), PRDs, MRDs, presentations, mocks, images, screen shots, project plans, white papers, roadmaps, and a ton of other crap. Oh and email. I saved just about every email ever sent to me and every email I ever sent. Now all of it is gone and I have to decide if I really want it back. I don't think so.

I think I'm going to just grab the last couple of weeks of work and then some archive work for My Lists and the Shoposphere. The rest of it can just... poof!

On another note... I've been playing with Ning the last couple of days. I cloned a Wish List app and then customized it to search Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Plus some of the language. I needed help though. I have a basic understanding of PHP, but not enough to some basic things. Thanks to Mike for helping out. I created The Thinglist and Favorite Things. Essentially they are easy list tools that allow you to say what you want or like, tag it and share with others. Pretty simple. But it's good to think about other ways lists can be generated. I can think of a dozen things I'd do to improve what's there. So maybe Mike and I will team up for some added functionality. Please give them a try. Sign up and add stuff to the lists.

January 26, 2006

It seems that there is some traction about the idea of a Digital Life Manager. Something I dreamed up a while back, but then saw that Marc Canter has had a similar idea that he's been evangelizing... I'm glad I'm not alone. I just makes it that much more valid, not that I'm in the same league with Señor Canter. I'll link to three cases, but I'm not going to spill any beans yet. I'm still trying to get my thing off the ground. I have some secret sauce.

By the way, I got the Talking Heads "Brick" today. Listening to it now. It's all their studio albums in one package. All remixed and dual disc. One side CD, the other side a DVD with a 5.1 mix, videos, photos, and other content about each album.

January 25, 2006

I only have this to say. All I know is what I'm being asked to do every single day... bust my
ass to build the best search experience ever. I also know that neither Google nor Yahoo! have come close. I've said this before and of course it's true, what's been created and developed so far is nothing compared to what will be. I
can only speak from my perspective, but I know for a fact that Yahoo!
understands this and is completely dedicated to the vision of providing
the absolute best search experience. But we're going to do
it on our terms, not Google's or anyones. To think otherwise is a
joke. And those that jerked their knees have greatly miscalculated us... or really have way too much time on their hands.

January 20, 2006

I have trouble getting to sleep. I just lie there and can't shut my brain off. It's not a good thing. It could be the coffee or something else. My head reels with noise and clutter and ideas and crap. It's like I have some sort of internal tourettes syndrome. I think of the same thing over and over again from every conceivable angle like a tick. So now my head aches.

I was going to write somethin' about all the Web 2.0 hoo ha. I'm getting tired of it already. So much hype for so little. To me, Wikipedia is the only worthwhile application that's considered "Web 2.0." And if you don't, you're kidding yourself. The rest is a bunch of time wasting fluff designed to either do the same old thing but with a slick interface, or provide some kind of ego gratifying self expression. "LOOK AT ME!"

This is all cool, I mean I use some of this stuff, but are any of these new sites or features really making my life easier? Are they making my time online more productive? Think about it... aren't they actually complicating things a little bit more? The potential is there, but that's not enough. Here's what I'd like to see before we move on to 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever...

I'd like search to be good. Right now Google sux, Yahoo! sux, they all suck compared to what they should be. If you don't agree, then you shouldn't be in this business.

I'd like to not have to deal with spam. Everything up until now has been a hack. There needs to be a better way. Email, domain squatting, whatever. Kill it. Make it so I never have to see it again, ever.

I'd like a way to deal with feeds that make the information I'm receiving more meaningful to me. I want to be able to subscribe to hundreds (thousands?) of feeds and still be able to easily absorb that information. The information that's important.

I'd like to keep track of my digital life and lifestyle in one place. What have I done? What am I doing? What do I need to do? Then let me keep track of those whom are important to me in the same manner.

Do this please. Make my life better. Make my life easier. Make it so I can actually spend less time in front of a screen. Not more. Simplify, scale back, refine, improve. Remove all things unnecessary in everything that you're doing. Please. Then talk to me about the next generation of web applications.

I was going to write about all of that... but then I heard the new Flaming Lips song on Yahoo! Music and I realized that none of this really matters...

January 15, 2006

Since Jane went to Mexico for the weekend, I brought the kids along with me to Macworld on Friday. We dropped Janie off in the morning at the airport then took the train up to the city for the day. My first impression was that it was so much smaller than years past. It's probably been a few since my last Macworld, but I definitely remember it taking up both north and south halls of Moscone center. Perhaps the last one I went to was just the south hall as well, but for some reason it was more noticeable. It also seemed that the majority of the booths were iPod related. This makes me wonder where Apple would be without the iPod... scary.

It was sort of funny to see all the people crowded around the new iMacs and "MacBooks," I mean there really wasn't anything new there. Just Intel inside... what, were they somehow measuring the clock speed of an import of a large iPhoto library? (that's a geek joke... you're supposed to laugh at that.)

It was good to go though. I love the Mac. I always have. My first computer was an Apple. Perhaps it's the designer in me, but I'm so drawn to the aesthetic that keeps getting better and better. Sure some stuff ticks me off, like how inclusive Apple is about their services, and how they can be arrogant about their products, but that's easy to ignore when they seem to do such a good job of delivering what I'm looking for (or didn't know I was looking for).

The best product I saw there was an iPod accessory. There were tons, but the new Griffin TuneCenter is pretty cool. It's an iPod dock that's wireless, has a remote and connects to your TV and stereo. It can play and display anything on your 5G iPod video. You can access your photos, songs, and videos through an onscreen display. It even connects to the web to play Internet radio... only $99 bucks.

There was some other nice stuff. I liked the demo I saw for Delicious Monster's DeliciousLibrary. I'm going to try it out. I've seen it before, but it looks like this new version has a pretty seamless interaction with Amazon's API. Inspirational to say the least.

I watched the iLife demo and was entertained with how easy everything looked and how it all tied together so nicely. Good good. I went home and played with iWeb some more. It's definitely doing some cool stuff on the back-end, I mean the drag and drop media placement and all is sweet. I can see the potential, but until they allow the ability to sync and upload to any web server, It's useless to me. .mac isn't that great.

That's it for now. I welcome any comments. Uh... yeah. Jane comes home tomorrow so all will be back to normal. I'm still working on that other blog idea. I'll reveal it soon. L8.

January 12, 2006

As promised, here are my thoughts on Amazon's homepage. One interesting thing about
their design is that it hasn't really changed very much. The basic layout and
presentation has been consistent over the years. If you go to archive.org you
can see what I mean.

Overview

* Dynamic homepage

* Constantly updates

* Modules can move around easily

* New emphasis on searching

* Personalized user experience

* Clustered browse navigation

* More product centric

* Uses advertorial merchandising and product promotion

* Occasionally presents internal graphical media

The Amazon homepage is an interesting subject. Many
people see it as visually cluttered and unbalanced. However much of the content
is highly personalized so the information it presents is very relevant. This
offsets the clutter factor because the content has some meaning to the user. It
endeavors to display categories, products, and other merchandising information
based on the users preferences, past purchases, saved products and other
affinities.

What makes the Amazon homepage unique and a more
desirable destination page, besides personalization, is the fact that the page
changes constantly. It’s always fresh. There’s always something new. This
works very well for Amazon because of the number of users that come in through
the front door. They portray a very active space and can use the homepage to
move the needle on promotions, merchandise and categories.

In my opinion the Amazon page offers too much content
and merchandising. I mostly use it to search for a product or access my
account, cart, or wish list. I rarely use the left hand side navigation and the
merchandising rarely appeals to me. I am interested in sales and deals for
different categories, so sometimes I give those promotions attention. If I want
to see a category, I usually click on the tab on top so I don’t need to
scroll. Some of their personalization can also be confusing. Is
“Your favorite categories” direct navigation or does it link to a specialized
page or list for me? I don’t want to take the time to find out.

Something that they've been doing since the holiday, is
promoting recommendations three across on the top of the page. This drives me
nuts. Once
again, they're using products that I purchased for my children and wife to
recommend products to me. So basically they show completely irrelevant stuff
right up top. Then the effort it takes to try to correct the recommendations is
ridiculous. "Not interested, not interested, not interested, not
interested..."

January 11, 2006

I picked up Apple's iLife 2006 this evening. The new features seem worth it. But I have to tell you that iWeb doesn't appear to be usable. From what I can gather, you pretty much need to use it with .mac. They don't give you any other ftp option. You can write out your site to a folder, but then I guess it's up to you to upload it to your own server. I haven't checked out how the pages are generated so I don't know how well they're optimized for search engines either. Also .mac won't let you use your own domain. This means that your iWeb homepage url will look like this: http://web.mac.com/yourusername/iweb/yourwebsite/ or some crap. Why? The blogging tool also doesn't seem appealing. I really don't want to edit my blog in-line or have it appear to be in-line. It's actually not natural. The ability to blog needs to be available from anywhere at anytime. And so having it part of the browser funtion or on a server makes the most sense still.

I'm not going tototally trash it yet. I'll go to Macworld and watch the demo and then I'll try to build a site with it to see if I'm wrong, but first blush isn't that appealing. The podcast feature is decent in GarageBand (are there going to be that many podcasts?) and so are the new features in iMovie and iPhoto, so I'm happy with the purchase, but I was hoping iWeb would have been much more.

"So go ahead. Join the blogging revolution with iWeb. Viva la you!"

Okay back to regularly scheduled programming...

Update: I just realized... There is no comment function on an iWeb blog... WTF?

I've noticed that I haven't had too many posts about other shopping sites. It was always the plan to comment freely on what's going on in the industry. But I've had a difficult time commenting on my competitors because, well I guess I don't really want them to know how I feel. That is if they even read this goofy thing.

Obligatory Introduction

I'm David Beach and this is my blog. I'm a Product Manager, Information Architect, and founder of 12seconds.tv. I work for eBay Mobile. I'm also surviving lung cancer. This site is about my life online and some other junk... enjoy ;)